Durham House Street

Sir Walter Raleigh's Durham House is long gone, but its name remains, along with those of other great houses that once stood along the Strand. This is where, in the late sixteenth century, Thomas Harriot and Manteo (and possibly Wanchese and Towaye) crafted the Ossomocomuck orthography, the key to a language spoken by the not-entirely-willing hosts of a failed colony. Manteo (from Croatan Island) and Wanchese (from Roanoke Island) had first been brought over in 1584 and returned home to Ossomocomuck with Sir Richard Grenville’s expedition to settle a colony. There, Manteo became an ally and interpreter to the colonists, while Wanchese led his people to take up arms against the English. Manteo would return to London with Towaye in 1586 to further aid in planning for the restoration of the already ailing colony. The eventual disappearance of the Roanoke colony by 1590 is one of the great mysteries of North American history. This relatively early instance of coercing Indigenous interlocutors back to England in order to secure their knowledge of terrain, hostile groups, and resources such as gold, became a mainstay of Raleigh’s operations among the Miskito in Guiana (present day Venezuela) in the 1590s.